Jim's Book

20 Looking to the Future

After the wild journey of the past forty-eight years in business, a different person might look at this as a time to sit back and rest on their laurels. But that's just not Jim's nature. He's still using his abilities as a big-picture, long-term thinker to look to the future. Not only has he spent enormous effort thinking about how society was thousands of years ago, and what it might be far into the future, he also directs his long-term thinking to his business. Cynthia Tjong, the head of finance, explained, ‘His vision is long term. He doesn't focus on what we're doing now'.

Tino Grossi shared the same sentiment: ‘Jim can see what people will want in the future, what the needs of the country will be, and not in one month, not in the near future — he sees the far future'.

Ben Siddons, a divisional manager, said, ‘He's very, very strategic. He's always thinking, always has ideas'.

Perhaps the best example of Jim's ability to think into the future is his latest business venture, an aggregator site called GoBlitz. Aggregators are typically websites that aggregate related and frequently updated content from various sources for easy viewing in one consolidated place. Examples for booking a flight are Webjet and Skyscanner, which search for the cheapest fares on multiple websites and aggregate that information onto one webpage for you. In the home service industry, websites like hipages and Airtasker are Jim's competition — they aggregate a wide range of ...